The weekly summary of medical news developments for Breast Cancer and Cancer for the week ending 21 August 2014.

This post focuses on screening. Call it coincidence, but there were three articles on different ways to screen for breast cancer, this week. The first is a trial into using dogs to sniff out breast cancer. I’ve covered dogs being used to sniff out cancer in previous posts, but this time, scientists are finally testing this on breast cancer. Perhaps one day the gold standard in screening could be a golden labrador!

Dr Claire Guest and Daisy Photo: Janine Warwick

Item number 2 is a study that shows that MRIs are more accurate than ultrasound and mammogram in detecting recurrent tumours. I wonder how MRIs compare to Pet-CTs in terms of radiation exposure. There is no ionizing radiation in an MRI. The dose for a typical PET-CT scan is 25 mSv for a 70-kg person. The dose for a mammogram is 0.4 to 0.7 mSv. The PET-CT gives 625 times more radiation. CT scans alone produce 7 mSV, 10 to 15 times the dose of a mammogram.

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